Thursday, May 22, 2008

After a recent string of incredibly disappointing cheesesteaks — seriously, the one we had this past weekend at Tony Luke's very well could have been dog meat — it might be time to go haute for a change.

Like the $100 cheeser at Barclay Prime. Remember her?

In case you’ve forgot, CBS3 recently did a web segment on the sandwich and you can watch Chef James Locascio prepare the monster sandwich with Kobe beef, butter poached lobster, vidalia onions, shaved summer truffles ($900 a pound), and melted Tallegio cheese. (Lobster was substituted in for foie gras after Starr folded decided not to serve the foie in his restaurants.)

(Note: CBS3 apparently takes their internets lessons with the Philly.com team as neither understands the value of making their videos embeddable.)

Oh, yeah — it’s also an excuse to check out CBS3's new web reporter, Melissa Brewer, who was Miss Pennsylvania in 2005. Yea — just sayin'.

Any other ideas of places to go for a high-end cheesesteak? Toss ‘em in the comments. No cheesesteak springrolls, though, thank you very much — we like our sandwiches with bread.

(Not that we don’t love us some Jim’s and, ugh, as much as it pains us to admit it, Geno's too — we just need a high-quality cheeser right now to remind us of how delicious this sandwich is supposed to be.)

ben, thanks. we were actually on our way to John's last saturday when we discovered that they killed their on-again/off-again saturday hours for the second time in the past two years. so that's how we ended up at tony luke's. (which is normally a pretty decent consolation, just not this time.)

meanwhile, steve's is simply too far to ever be a viable go-to option for us.

and burke, thanks for the suggestion. however, we're all too familiar with the food at ten stone. that sandwich might be okay, but the food menu as a whole there is a complete prefabrication from an “upscale-bar-menu-in-a-box” package from some restaurant-foodservice supplier. we'd rather eat somewhere where the kitchen has demonstrated at least some capacity for innovation/creativity.

(the beer list at ten stone is another story and probably the main reason we’ve tolerated the place for so long.)

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